Our infantile attitude to money over the last decade has played a large role in Ireland's demise, writes Ronald Quinlan

'LET me say this to you all: you are not responsible for this crisis." By letting the people of Ireland off the hook in his State of the Nation address last Sunday night, Taoiseach Enda Kenny shamelessly resorted to the big lie.

SPEND, SPEND, SPEND: During the Celtic Tiger, jetting off on a shopping trip to New York was a common extravagance (picture posed by model)

'LET me say this to you all: you are not responsible for this crisis." By letting the people of Ireland off the hook in his State of the Nation address last Sunday night, Taoiseach Enda Kenny shamelessly resorted to the big lie.

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Ronald Quinlan: Enda, you're wrong, we all spent, we are all at fault

Independent.ie

'LET me say this to you all: you are not responsible for this crisis." By letting the people of Ireland off the hook in his State of the Nation address last Sunday night, Taoiseach Enda Kenny shamelessly resorted to the big lie.

But as lies go, the Taoiseach and the backroom advisers who pull his strings could be confident that it would go down well with a public long since convinced that a golden circle of bankers and developers somehow conspired to destroy their lives.

In giving us the licence to persist with our sense of victimhood, however, Mr Kenny didn't do any of us any favours. Not that this was a first for our Taoiseach. Indeed, on the night he was elected last February, Mr Kenny was already telling us what we wanted to hear as opposed to what we needed to hear, when he said: "Paddy likes to know what the story is," knowing full well that there's nothing 'Paddy' likes less than hearing the truth -- especially if it refers to him.

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